Windows 11 beta changes what the Print Screen button does after 33 years

Windows 11 revamps many Windows features that haven’t been updated in a while, including venerable apps like Notepad and Sound Recorder. But in a beta released earlier this month, the company changed something even older: Pressing the “Print Screen”button on your keyboard opens the Snipping tool, rather than copying the contents of the screen to the clipboard to paste into an image-editing app.. .

In the current non-beta version of Windows 11, this default print screen behavior is disabled in the keyboard accessibility settings. Instead, the change will make the setting enabled by default.

In the old days of MS-DOS, before graphical user interfaces were the norm, the Print Screen button’s function was quite literal – take whatever text was displayed on the screen and print it out on a real physical printer. (Older keyboards also had space to write “print screen”on the keycap, whereas most modern keyboards abbreviate this to “prt sc”or something similar incomprehensible to people who don’t yet know what the key does.) More abstract copy – Clipboard behavior dates back to at least Windows 3.0, which was originally released in 1990. The built-in screenshot tools in Windows have changed from the Snipping Tool to Snip & Sketch in Windows 10 and back to the Snipping Tool in Windows 11, but the Print Screen key has continued to do the same.

In the current version of Windows 11, the Windows-Shift-S keyboard shortcut is used to bring up the Snipping Tool, and apparently it will continue to work that way for those who have it fixed in memory or whose keyboards don’t have the Print Screen key. You can also disable the new print screen setting in Keyboard Accessibility settings, reverting to 90s-era behavior.

Microsoft often tests new UI designs and default settings in its Windows Insider Preview builds that don’t make it into the version of Windows available to the general public. It is possible that Microsoft will reverse this change in a future beta, opting to keep the Print Screen button working the way it does now.